


Mosaic

by therev



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-20
Updated: 2010-04-20
Packaged: 2017-11-02 08:28:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/366990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therev/pseuds/therev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They meet at a library, of all places. Claire sets it up. Jones is waiting outside in the cold, doing his best not to pace, looking for a big bloke in a blue coat and smoking one after another after another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mosaic

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Dan and Jones were involved pre-series.

They meet at a library, of all places. Claire sets it up. Jones is waiting outside in the cold, doing his best not to pace, looking for a big bloke in a blue coat and smoking one after another after another.

“Are you Jones?” someone asks him from behind and he turns to find a man wearing a brown jumper with hair to match.

“Are you blue coat?” he asks, drops his cigarette and stubs it out beneath his shoe.

“Yeah,” the man says, “but you can call me brown jumper.”

“You’re Claire’s brother?” he asks, takes another cigarette offered by the man who keeps one out for himself. The man nods.

“And you’re Claire’s junkie.”

“Eh, ex junkie, alright. You don’t fuck about, do you?”

The man watches the people around him more than he actually looks at Jones. “I need a place to sleep, not a best mate.”

Jones fingers the spare key in his pocket. “D’you like techno?”

The man seems to consider this, tilts his head and says, “Define ‘like’.”  
________

There’s an extra room for another bed but it’s filled with things Jones won’t throw out, old posters, random ephemera, the guts of electronic devices, cardboard standups of movie characters, street signs from different parts of the city, clothing he no longer wears, and crates, stacks and stacks of crates filled with records.

“I can get all of this out of here in a few days, if you ain’t in a hurry,” Jones offers, biting his thumbnail and standing next to Dan in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, looking over the densely packed room. Dan runs a hand over his mouth, rubs his chin as if by some odd habit, considering.

“Could I just sleep on the settee?”  
________

Dan has few belongings. At first they’re piled into one corner of the cluttered room he’s meant to be renting, but they eventually find their way out, fitting into the empty spaces between Jones’s things, snugged up beside, stacked above, folded over. Soon the two are indistinguishable.

“No drugs, yeah?” is the nearest thing to a house rule that Jones mentions, shyly issued one morning over bowls of cereal.

“Are you asking if I have any?” Dan says, heaping spoon at the ready.

“I’m asking you not to,” Jones says and stuffs his mouth with fruity colorful crunchy bits and smiles around them. Dan only looks back to his breakfast but Jones catches the lift of the corner of his mouth.  
________

A routine settles over them like dust. One up for work while the other sleeps late, one going out as the other comes in, one showering while the other shaves at the sink and complains about the fogged mirror.

Nights are hardest. Jones requires distraction. And sweets. Luckily, Dan doesn’t care for chocolate and doesn’t seem to mind Jones’s restlessness.

If Dan likes techno it’s only because his mind processes it as little more than white noise, suitable for avoiding conversation and putting him to sleep.  
________

Most evenings there’s a little while when they’re both in and sometimes they’ll have a bite at the same time. Not together. Conversation is limited, as they have little in common.

“What have you got on tonight?” Jones asks, winding an electrical cord around his thin arm.

Dan’s sat on the couch, holding a newspaper he doesn’t really seem to be reading. He shrugs.

“I’ve got a gig,” Jones says, “if you’re interested.”

Dan doesn’t say he isn’t, but Jones doesn’t see him in the club, and when he gets home in the morning Dan’s still on the settee, asleep sitting up, newspaper folded in his lap, fingers slack and ink-black.  
_________

On a Sunday, in the afternoon, Dan is not working and Jones is not sleeping and after some prodding Jones convinces Dan to see a film with him. The movie’s shit and they both agree to walk out and Dan tries to stoop but someone shouts for him to get the fuck out of the way and Dan replies with equal politeness and a gesture unmistakable even in the dim theatre and Jones stands behind him, chest to back, and does the same.

On the street they’re grinning and Jones is laughing and bumping into Dan and promises to mix a song about it and call it “Twat in the Cinema”. They sit for hours at a coffee shop and Dan talks about writing and Jones talks about everything but addiction and they go back to see the rest of the shit film which was somehow better the second time. Dan stands and walks into the lobby more than once but no one else shouts at him. They get back to the flat late, soaked with rain, slipping on wet shoes, stumbling through the door, drunk with laughter.  
______

Jones stares at the floor of the flat. "The gig was shit,” he says loud enough for Dan to hear, "they hated it.”

From the kitchen Dan assures him, "Then they're fucking deaf twats. Cuppa?"  
______

The first kiss is thoughtless. Jones is explaining his theory of time travel via soundwaves and Dan, a little drunk, claims to understand, smiling at him from across a table in the Nailgun. Jones, happy to not be judged a lunatic, leans forward and kisses Dan just beside his mouth, and though Dan looks a bit surprised Jones is sure he felt him lean forward, felt him purse his lips.

A while later they leave and Dan goes to work in the morning and works late that evening, and the next, so that it’s days before they see each other when one of them isn’t asleep.

When they finally do Jones is shaving and Dan comes to stand at the bathroom door as if waiting and Jones nods at him, smiles, but Dan only stands quietly and watches him in the mirror. Jones hurries to finish and brushes past Dan on his way out, “yours now,” he says, but he hears only a slight shuffle and a click behind him as he walks away. When he looks back Dan is nowhere to be seen and the bathroom is open and dark and empty.  
_________

Jones keeps busy. He has to. And anyway, there’s so much to do, music to make, canvases to paint, inventions to invent. And self promotion. The House of Jones is seeped in its namesake, his face on walls, telling time, announcing the number of phone messages and staring down judgementally from above the toilet.

He’s painting a marching band of Joneses over the kitchen sink one evening, stood on the counter in bare feet and pajama bottoms when Dan says something to him, shouting from the sitting room.

“You make me tired just watching you.” Dan’s sat on the sofa, doing absolutely nothing.

Jones smiles over his shoulder. “You make me feel a bit mad just sitting there, nothing doing. I’d go mental just thinkin’ all the time.”

Dan mumbles something Jones can’t hear and Jones asks what it was but Dan doesn’t repeat it.

“I’m going out,” Dan says after a while, louder and clearer.

“Dan,” Jones says, but the only answer is the sound of the door closing.  
_______

Jones wakes to the shift of a heavy weight suddenly on his bed, and then Dan is there, hovering over him, breath hot and strong with alcohol. Dan’s heavy, heavier than he looks even, and Jones says his name, trying to bring him around out of his stupor, and then Dan’s mouth is hot and wet and sloppy on his throat and Jones is half hard instantly.

He slips from beneath Dan with some effort, leaves him writhing on the bed, watches him for a moment before he pads into the kitchen to find something cold to drink and maybe a fresh distraction. Somehow he isn’t sleepy anymore.

He’s leaning against the counter when Dan shuffles in. He looks handsome in spite of the ruffled hair, the shifted clothing, the lazy, drunken smile. Or because of it.

“Sorry,” he says, leaning against the wall opposite Jones.

“S’alright,” Jones says, offers Dan the rest of his glass of water and Dan steps forward and takes it and sets it on the counter and then he’s in Jones’s space again, kissing his throat, mouthing and tonguing his skin, and Jones can’t remember ever feeling anything as hot as Dan’s mouth. Then Dan’s hands are under his t-shirt, running rough along his sides and down, fingers slipping easily beneath the waistband of his pajamas.

“Dan, I didn’t…” but he knows he did and so does Dan and Dan kisses him as if to say so, warm and soft and demanding and tasting of alcohol. Then Dan drops to his knees without warning, kisses Jones’s stomach through his shirt, noses at the fabric. Jones feels cold air hit him as Dan takes his pajamas down and his erection springs free, pushing his shirt up, waving teasingly at Dan and Dan’s hands on his hips, big and warm, make Jones feel small and he can’t not look down. When Dan takes him into his mouth Jones bends at the waist, at the knees, rocks forward onto his toes, releases the cold edge of the counter where he’d been gripping white-knuckled and puts his hands instead in Dan’s hair, fingers running through soft, brown curls. He whimpers encouragingly and says Dan’s name repeatedly. He’s dizzy and Dan’s mouth is so fucking hot, he comes fast with a strangled shout  
that surprises even him, clutching at Dan’s shoulders as he fights to stay on his feet.

When he finally leans up Dan is hugging him around the waist, nuzzling his stomach, humming and smiling and swaying on his knees.  
________

The sun through the window throws patterns onto the floor which Jones alters with scraps of paper he tapes to the glass. He’s calling it a shadow mosaic, the product of not being in his own bed and being awake at an unusual hour, and wanting the warmth of the sun on him.

He can hear a thud, a shuffle from the bedroom and looks up from the darker shapes on the floor by his feet but Dan does not appear. There is only the sound of a door creaking then closing, then a shower running.

“Alright, Dan,” Jones says later when Dan, scrubbed and freshly clothed and shaved and damp-haired, finds him behind his decks. He’s wearing his headphones but there’s no sound coming through.

Dan nods, stands fidgeting, brow deeply furrowed.

“Should I…” he says at last, finally looking at Jones, and gestures over his shoulder toward the door.

Jones shrugs, pretends to fiddle with knobs. He's dead tired and the beats in his mind are all jumbled and out of sync. “Not unless you want to, mate.”

Dan stands for a while longer, uncertain. Then walks nearer to the window where he’s noticed the pattern on the floor and watches it for longer than even Jones can pretend to be mixing. He finally slips the headphones off of his head and steps around the decks. It's warmer in the sun, standing next to Dan where they stare at the floor.

“It’s beautiful,” Dan says at last, then looks up. “I am sorry.”

Jones shifts his weight, foot to foot. “I’m not,” he says cautiously, “Only wish you hadn’t been pissed.”

Dan breathes a laugh, smiles, runs a hand through his damp hair until it’s a mess again. “Next time,” he says, “sober as a judge.”  
________

They share the bed, and sometimes the sofa. Dan gets home from work early most days, much earlier than before, and Jones realizes just how much time he’d been spending in pubs. Jones’s gigs can’t be over soon enough, his key is impatient in the lock, and he spends more time in the flat than he has since he moved in.

They rarely go out together, they run in different circles, neither very open nor open-minded. Sometimes Dan will go to a gig and it will be the best gig Jones can remember and he’ll tell Dan so later, nipping at his earlobe and tracing the shape of Dan’s cock through denim.

Jones goes with Dan to a work thing once, some stupid launch party for some idiotic feature. The music is shit and Dan’s co-workers are more shit and he stands awkward in the corner with an even more awkward Dan and a very pretty woman named Sasha who is so starry-eyed over Dan she can’t see straight.

Jones doesn’t go to any more of Dan’s work things.

“She wants to fuck you,” he says to Dan in the half-dark from where he rests his head in Dan’s lap on the settee. “Sasha, I mean.”

“Probably not,” Dan says dismissively, takes a drag, free hand resting on Jones’s chest where Jones traces around his fingers, drawing the shape of them onto his shirt.

“More than that,” Jones says, not accusatory but matter-of-fact, “she wants to make love to you.”

“She is lovely,” Dan says.

“She is,” Jones admits.

“Maybe if there wasn’t someone else.”

“You seein’ someone else? Who’s that, then?”

“My landlord. Providing sexual favors in lieu of the rent.”

“Augh, that is well prostitute.”  
_______

On a warm Saturday morning Jones wakes to find the blankets pulled away from him and Dan’s mouth just below his ribs, tickling, moving lower, then on to his hips trailing across and down to the juncture of his thigh and the soft skin there. He licks, tongue wide and wet and teasing and Jones curses in whispers and spreads his legs a little, slides his hand across his naked stomach, down toward his cock but Dan is there first, a broad lick to the underside, straight up to the tip and then he takes the head into his mouth and sucks, wet and hot, and down, all the way until Jones is saying “fuck” more than he’s saying “Dan” and Dan holds his hips down in the way that makes Jones feel trapped and secure at once.

Dan releases him with a sloppy wet sound and Jones whimpers down at him. “Wait,” Dan says firmly, emphasizing it with a pointed finger, and then he’s up and gone.

It’s a bit of torture but Jones does as he’s told, watches the ceiling, his throat dry from panting. Moments later Dan hovers over him, still naked and hard and he’s brought a condom and a tube of something. Jones guesses its contents. He pushes himself up to lean against the wall and Dan sits beside him, places his treasures on Jones’s naked thigh. They both look at them.

“Have you…” Jones ventures, dragging his eyes up to Dan’s. Dan who looks so calm and almost unlike himself. “I mean, ever?”

“No.” Dan says, half-smiling.

Jones is sure his heartbeat is audible even over his still-heavy breathing. “Alright,” he says at last, and leans forward to kiss Dan and pull him down across his body, condom and tube lost between them and into the sheets, though not for long.  
_______

“What are you doing?”

“I’m recording our lovemaking?”

“Our fucking?”

“Yeah, Roger Romantic, our fucking.”

“I don’t think my cock makes any sound.”

“I dunno, it sings to me.”

“A cock serenade?”

“A fucking rock concert. A cock concert. In my arse.”

“You’re mad.”

“I’m feeling like an encore.”  
______

Dan’s moods are cyclical. Jones tries to find a rythym but it’s difficult when he’s still struggling to pound out his own. When they’re good, they’re so good it scares him. And when they’re not-so-good, and Dan can’t seem to open his mouth without pouring something down it, it scares him more.

Jones is hanging great swaths of drapery on the ceiling of the sitting room the day he borrows one of Dan’s t-shirts. He’s not sure why, he doesn’t even like The Clash. It’s too big and the sleeves aren’t cut off but he likes the feel of it, the image in his mind, like wearing Dan’s skin. When Dan walks in and sees him wearing it, looking up at Jones standing precariously on a trunk, he mumbles something and asks Jones if he didn’t have any of his own to wear, and shuffles out the door.

That evening Dan presents himself for Jones’s approval in a too tight, too short baby blue sleeveless tee that reads ‘Music Is My Hot Hot Sex’ in bright pink lettering, and Jones can only laugh, rub at the fabric stretched over Dan’s stomach and nod and say “alright” when Dan whispers an apology hot against his skin.  
_______

Jones finds an old reel-to-reel in a secondhand shop, and in a dusty corner of the same place, a typewriter, compact and heavy and smelling of metal and oil and ink. He can’t even find a ribbon to fit, he has to fake it with the wrong size. But it works, mostly, and Dan seems happy in his quiet way when he finds it sitting square on the coffee table.

Dan types more than he ever says aloud. Jones can hear him clacking into the early morning. He writes with an angry scowl and when his hands aren't on the keyboard they're scrubbing at the beard he hasn't shaved in days, or lifting a bottle that seems to refill itself when Jones isn’t looking. Jones samples the sounds, the clang and stutter, distinctive ‘ding’ and ‘zip’ and, occasionally, Dan’s cough.

"You letting your hair grow?" Jones asks him one day, sitting on the arm of the sofa and looking over Dan's shoulder, he leans in so that the whistle around his neck swings and thuds Dan in the ear.

"No," Dan says, irritated, his fingers going still over the keys, pats himself down, pulls a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. “Light?” he asks Jones.

“Really?” Jones asks, “I quit weeks ago, Dan.”

“Did you?” Dan says, surprised, then stands and walks into the kitchen to get a light from the stove.  
_________

Jones gets pissed on his birthday. He doesn't mean to but he's not out with his usual friends, the ones that know better than to buy him a drink, the ones that know how much he likes to please people, and Dan's not with him.

The next day he rolls out of bed and shuffles as softly as possible into the bathroom and drops to his knees to vomit everything he's ever eaten in his entire life into the bowl. He remembers turning down something offered, he remembers feeling dizzy, he remembers getting off with a couple of girls whose names he definitely doesn't remember. He also remembers not turning down something offered. And Dan, standing in the bathroom, arms around him, too tight.

Jones looks at his hands and the red marks there, half-moon shapes, as if something had been pried from them, taken from him.

He can’t find Dan. He thinks to call him but he doesn’t. He leans against the wall in the hallway, slides down to the floor, makes himself small.

When he wakes again Dan is beside him, making him sit up from where he’s curled on the floor. Dan’s arms are warm around him and strong, pulling him close. He feels like a child.

“I fucked up,” he says into Dan’s shirt.

“Only a little,” Dan says, shushing him.

“That’s fucking more than I’ve got, Dan.”

“You’ve got more than you think.”

“I don’t want to go back.”

“You won’t.”  
_______

There are nights when they lie in Jones’s bed, kissing and fondling until Dan falls asleep and Jones will watch him for a while and sometimes sleep as well. Sometimes he will get antsy and move into the sitting room and stand behind his decks until a bit before the alarm is meant to go off, then slip into bed, with enough time to warm his feet before Dan rolls over and kisses his cheek and is up and about.

Some days Dan doesn’t get out of bed, not for hours after the alarm’s gone off. And though Jones enjoys falling asleep with Dan awake and breathing beside him, warmed by his body and the single strip of sunlight that makes its way through makeshift drapes, he knows it’s selfish. He knows why Dan can’t force himself out of bed and into the daylight proper.

There are nights, too, when Dan turns away from him, and eventually leaves the bed to sleep on the sofa, and Jones doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t retreat to his decks, and the clock on the wall flashes away the seconds, the minutes, the hours, his own face huge and screaming down at him.  
_________

Jones gets a gig. A monumentally fucking major gig.

He almost tells Dan, but when he walks in the door and finds Dan on the settee where he’d left him hours earlier, he just fires up his decks, slides on his headphones, a comfort somehow. He imagines them hugging his brain, holding it all in, stopping it from pouring out his ears, in excitement, in panic, he isn’t sure which. It all has the same effect.

The night of the gig Dan gets so pissed he probably should go to hospital. Jones stays with him, one eye on the clock, wakes Dan once in a while, endures the cursing, the sick, and keeps Dan lying on his side so he won’t drown in his own vomit.

He misses the gig. And even though the stink of alcohol is strong in the flat and Dan’s retching in the bathroom, Jones eyes the half-full bottle.  
________

The dim light of the lounge is tinted purple by the fabric that hangs from the ceiling, softening edges, blurring the world, slightly coloring the white of Dan’s shirt where Jones’s hand rubs across his back.

“S’alright, Dan.”

“Don’t treat me like a fucking child, Jones.”

“It don’t mean nothing.”

“Been there, have you?”

“Yeah.”

“Off your tits on opiates, slobbering on yourself and not getting it up?”

“You’re an arse, Dan. And you’re pissed.”

Dan laughs, loud and harsh.

Jones stands and almost walks out but turns at the last, considers the form huddled on his settee. When the words come he can’t believe it’s him saying them. He’s heard them enough, he’s just never been on this side.

“I can’t deal with your shit and mine, Dan. I think…. Well, anyway, I got shit I want… a life, yeah?”

Dan laughs, his whole body shaking. “Fuck off,” he says, and as Jones grabs a coat and steps out the door he can hear Dan’s muffled, “Idiot.”  
______

Claire moves in. It doesn't change much. They've already stopped sleeping together. They get another sofa, slide it over the place in the floor where the shadows had once made a mosaic which Dan had thought was beautiful. With Claire there there's at least a reason to speak on occasion. She's as moody as her brother but predictable, and Jones wonders how he wound up in this dysfunctional family.

Then Dan writes the Idiot piece. Suddenly people on the street recognize him, shout his name in pubs, smile at him in shops. Jones watches the attention smother him.

“You wanted them to hate it,” Jones doesn’t say over the din of his own music, watching Dan sit listless and glassy-eyed, staring at nothing for hours. “You wanted them to hate you.”

“So did I,” he says out loud, but Dan’s not listening.  
________

Then Dan jumps.

Jones is in a record shop when he finds out. He overhears someone say the Preacherman’s in hospital. He walks outside and the shopkeeper shouts at him for not paying and Jones pitches the record in his hand back inside the door and thumbs open his mobile and calls Dan’s.

“Dan?” he says when he hears a voice on the other end but it’s not Dan and there are a couple of voices and someone says, “give me that,” and it’s Claire.

“Can I help you?” She asks, voice muffled and thick.

“Oh Christ,” he says and breathes and holds the phone out away from him, as if he doesn’t know how it got in his hand in the first place.

“Jones,” Claire says, but the voice is distant and small and he closes his phone on it.  
_______

He doesn’t go to the hospital.

That night he’s still on the street. A different street. He’s pacing and biting his thumbnail and across the street, on the corner, is a man in a big jacket he knows too well.

He takes a step off of the curb, toward the dark corner lit faintly overhead by a neon sign that doesn’t flash. A car rolls up and Jones hesitates, turns, paces a while longer until the man’s alone again. There’s a thick wad of damp fliers in the gutter, fading their color into the sewers. Dan’s face, torn and almost unrecognizable, stares back at him.

He steps off the curb again, his legs heavy, hands shoved deep into his pockets, damp around crisp bills.

The oversized coat watches him approach and smiles in a way that makes Jones’s stomach lurch but he steps up onto the man's curb anyway, slows his pace and the man says “my man, Jones” and Jones says “alright” and nods and looks away but still catches the confusion on the man’s face as he passes him by.

And then he’s running.  
________

He finds Claire back at the flat. She’s packing her things.

She curses Dan and the whole ordeal. She shouts at Jones then apologizes. She gathers piles of Dan’s writing and throws them in the bin.

She says she can’t deal with his shit and her own. She says she loves him but she’s got her own life to live. She says thanks and take care, and maybe she’ll see Jones around sometime, yeah?  
________

In the morning Jones opens the window and pushes his head out to look down onto the street, the sun bright and warm on his dark head. He shakes it out, scrubs his hand through his hair. Then he ducks back inside and pulls a crate full of records over to him, between his thin legs, and selects an album at random, pulling it from its protective sleeve. He runs his fingers over the perfect grooves, listens to the sharp ‘zip’ sound his nails make across them, then leans over the back of the settee, out the window again, and holds the record out as far as he can, a loose grip between two fingertips, and lets go.  
________

When he finally visits Dan he only stands in the doorway, looking in on the still body under white sheets and the gentle rise and fall of Dan’s chest. He tries to figure how many times the sound of Dan breathing has put him to sleep. He loses count when a nurse walks in and he slips past her and out into the hallway.

The next time he visits he stands inside the door and watches his feet until someone puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s Sasha, carrying flowers and smiling at him. He watches her walk over beside the bed where Dan lies, just walk over as if it’s the easiest thing in the world. He hears her say something about Dan’s complexion but he isn’t listening, he’s rocking on his feet, back and forth and she’s leaning over Dan, so close until he says he has to go and she says perhaps she’ll see him around.

The day he finally finds himself standing next to Dan’s bed is the day before Dan’s meant to go home. Dan’s asleep at first, and Jones just watches him, wondering if he should wake him, reading the rude comments his shit co-workers have written on his casts, the even worse ones signed ‘Trashbat.co.ck’.

When the nurse comes in he makes a move toward the door but she says she’ll only be a second, presses buttons on monitors, scribbles onto a chart. Dan’s awake when she leaves, watching Jones with no sign of surprise, his gaze heavy and drugged, face pale.

“Alright, Dan,” Jones says, failing at pretending to be cheerful.

Dan only nods slightly and watches Jones until movement on the bed catches Jones’s eye and he looks down to see Dan wiggling his fingers at the end of the cast. After a moment he touches them, cold and weak, holds them in his own.

Dan clears his throat and in a thick voice that cracks in a way Jones has never heard from Dan or another living soul, he says, “I fucked up, Jones.”

“Only a little,” Jones says and Dan’s fingers squeeze his own, grateful.

“You find that life you were looking for?” Dan asks.

Jones tilts his head as if considering. “Turns out I’ve already got one, imagine that,” he says.

Dan nods in an odd, jerky way, eyes red-rimmed. His mouth quivers. “You deserve better.”

Jones smiles crookedly, half frowning. “You might do as well,” he manages to say, then leans down to kiss dry lips and tear-salted cheeks.  
________

The flat is freshly painted and so is the cast on Dan’s arm, a rainbow of colors bookended in black bands, covering signatures and rude drawings. The one on his leg is a study in paper-mâché, old newspapers, scraps of notes, discarded typing paper, anything but Nathan’s fliers or the slick pages of SugarApe. Jones says they’ll save them when they’re taken off, put them on display, maybe make lamps.

He has managed to insinuate himself beneath Dan’s cast arm, half on, half off of Dan’s lap, stretched long on the settee. They watch some ridiculous comedy, the sound a low murmur. Dan’s stomach occasionally grumbles louder than the laugh track, and the fingers of his uncast hand move lazily through Jones’s hair, making Jones sleepy.

Just as Jones is dropping off he feels Dan shift slightly and cough. “I’m happy,” Dan says and Jones figures that’s the lot of it. It’s enough. Then Dan adds, “I’m happy to be here.”

If he means in the flat, with Jones, on the settee, alive, Jones isn’t sure and doesn’t ask, only shifts the position of his body until he’s looking up at Dan’s face and reaches a hand to the back of Dan’s neck.

“Yeah?” he says.

“I’m lucky you’d have me,” Dan says down at him, breath calm and even, a slow rhythm Jones tries to match but never can, chest and heart burning for a faster pace.

“You’re lucky I like you more than I should.”

Dan smiles but it fades when he says, “I can’t imagine why.”

Jones smiles by way of reply and pulls Dan’s head down as he lifts himself up, lips meeting halfway.

The television is soon entirely quiet, the flat dark but for a lamp in the bedroom and the red and green LEDs telling time, all different. There’s bits of paper taped to a window and a typewriter on the table, the decks are still and a marching band of Joneses pound out their endless silent song to a quiet kitchen. And in newly-dried paint the door to the outside world reads:

House of Jones and Ashcroft  
Piss Off, Yeah?


End file.
